Methods for organizational development

Abstract

Organizational development refers to the continual change which large, distributed organizations undergo. Described are some methods for organizational development. These methods include message elimination, regrouping, reclustering, regression, and reuse. Development occurs within a modeling system called Ubik. It is a concurrent object based system which supports a high level representation of an organization, The structure of an organization is modeled with collections of linked together objects. The action of an organization is carried out via message passing. Active messages are used to buitd a specialized object called a Tapeworm, which monitors and constrains organizational structure and action, The Tapeworms are used to identify the mismatch between the model and the external organization. They are also used to support the development methods.